The world knows three things about me,’ says Robert Lindsay as Aristotle Onassis: ‘I’m fucking Maria Callas, I’m fucking Jackie Kennedy and I’m fucking rich.’ According to Martin Sherman’s glancing bio-drama of the world’s most notorious luxury-yacht-owner, ‘Ari’ also fucked over Bobby Kennedy – by paying the PLO to assassinate him. That conspiracy theory just shows how tricky it is to separate the tycoon from the expensive mist of glamour and gossip that wafted around him.
You could say it is to its credit that this play, directed by Nancy Meckler, doesn’t try. It’s a gossip column told by a Greek chorus who narrate, tut at and excuse Ari’s increasingly lurid sins like elders in a Greek tavern. The chorus underlines the point: we’re here to gaze at Mount Onassis – a powerful spectacle thanks to Robert Lindsay, full of monstrous kitsch and thick-lensed charisma. OTT flair suits this Midas-like shagger and schemer, whose bar stools were upholstered in genuine whale scrotum. Lindsay, who dances like a cross between Sven Goran Eriksson, Bruce Forsyth and Zeus, has cultivated a marvellous millionaire’s soft-shoe shuffle – arms raised, deck-shoes a-twinkle, he hypnotises his victims. That’s lucky, because the play, which is mostly heavily accented monologues about events that would have been highly dramatic had they been staged, prefers watching him dance to making him act.
Sherman gilds his Ari with Greek tragedy. The gods punish his hubris by killing his Adonis-like son. Maria Callas (played with such operatic effect by Anna Francolini that there’s more dramatic conflict between her painted mouth and swooping eyebrows than in Sherman’s whole drama) takes the role of nemesis, cursing her absconding lover with the voice he encouraged her to ruin. It’s vertiginously silly but fascinating and fun: Katrina Lindsay’s set, with its watery margins, and the harsh and lovely rebetika singing, give it (like Onassis himself) lashings of glamour, but not enough to persuade the critics (who have somewhat over-pummelled this production) that celebrity gods and goddesses can make vulgarity sublime.